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Monday, August 23, 2010

#53: Alan Cantwell

One of the most passionate (and lunatic) defenders of one of the greatest crackpots of the last century,Wilhelm Reich. Among Cantwell’s writings in defense of Reich is this nice article. For those who don’t know Reich’s views, orgone is supposed to be the life force, the material realization of Freud’s libido – pure pseudoscience with strong sexual undertones, and unsurprisingly popular (and taken to the extreme of quackery when combined with new age healing techniques, e.g. in the hands of Reich’s disciple Charles Kelly).

And of course Cantwell takes it a step further. In this article he combines Reich’s orgone theory, rantings about microbiology, Blavatsky and cosmic energy to stunning heights.

And against this background, a grand theory of everything emerges. Why don’t we know about the stuff Cantwell has uncovered? Well, I won’t reveal it here, just direct you to his paper ”The cancer conspiracy”, ”SARS, bioterrorism and the media” and his book on man-made AIDS, ”Queer Blood: The Secret AIDS Genocide Plot”, which is available through the New Dawn Book Service.

Cantwell, in other words, is in at the deep end. A selection of his articles can be found here - according to the website, ”no links to these articles is allowed by the Wikipedia medical editors”. You do the math.
Diagnosis: Utter loon and megalomaniac whose approach to medicine is not science, but Cantwell’s law ”most physicians are wrong in their understanding of most diseases, most of the time” (and, tacitly understood, that Cantwell himself is correct). Influence is unknown – the orgonites are pretty common, but Cantwell is probably of the fringes of this fringe.